khanu

Just tried the van and it started first time So not the battery as I first figured - it being the first damp morning in a while this morning. Current thought is iffy/damp connection to starter motor, that dried out as it warmed up. Will get the ex-mechanic to look at it when he gets in from work

Van did not start this morning so I'm working from home today (Tuesdays is normally my day in the office). Need to sort the van out as I'm up at college this weekend for a seminar and I need to sleep in it on Sat night. I'm thinking of taking Khanu with me to keep me warm and so I don't' get mugged whilst sleeping at the side of the road..... Will be repeating the whole sleeping in the van adventure at college at the end of the sept too, as I've got college all weekend, and OH is away with cadets so all the dogs need to come up to Yorkshire with me - not looking forward to that much.

Yeah I can't remember the last NYE we had together, still it's overrated anyway.... The only saving grace we have now is that I work from home 4 days a week, before that we would literally pass each other on the A3 and get to see each other maybe 5 days a month-ish. At least we see each other for an hour or so most days now. I'm really looking forward to the Olympics, at least I'll be able to watch it all without him moaning about it being on TV all the time since he'll probably never be home!

Got a lay-in this morning Didn't wake up until 7.30, which meant there was only time to walk one set of dogs before heading off to Egham show with sister, nephew and my Mum and Dad. Just got back and I'm waiting for the weather to decide what it is going to do before I head out with the other lot of dogs. OH is policing Notting Hill Carnival all weekend - 3x12 hrs shifts we never get to do anything together on Aug bank holiday because of the stupid carnival.

Syd may well be banished back downstairs again at night. He started coming upstairs when we first got Talyn as he started have a go at everyone at night, even from his crate. However I don't think that is going to be a problem now that everyone has settled down again. Frankly I can't take being kicked, shoved over to the very edge of the King! sized bed, the lipsmacking and god knows what noises that have started to go on for hours in the early hours of the morning, and yesterday I was woken up at 4am from the gurgling of his stomach! This morning I got woken up by being continually kicked in the back and head whilst he ran in his sleep again, that was about 3am, I took the duvet and pillows and went to the spare room, shut the door so he couldn't' come in and finally fell asleep at just after 5am, got woken at 5.30 by OH getting up for work, who then left the door to the room open so Syd came in and took up the whole bloody bed again, except I was too tired to move so catnapped until 6.30 when Talyn decided it was time for everyone to be up. I haven't had a decent night's sleep for weeks now so Syd will just have to go back to sleeping in his crate again.

swap you? I've just had an argument (by email fortunately otherwise I would have called him a fecking feckwit) where another engineer believes the software has a bug. It doesn't it's just struggling to converge when he dumps a shed load of heat into the model at a certain point. Use the fecking method I've told you to use to get convergence and you will see that it's all fine. But oh no it must be a defect. The model doesn't even fecking converge for steady state, why he thinks it'll suddenly sort itself out in a transient case is beyond me. I'm currently uploading the converged project to our ftp site so that he can see for himself that he is a complete feckwit. Why bother asking me for help if you aren't going to accept it anyway? Fine just go to development with the problem, they'll ask me to investigate it anyway and I shall say you are talking crap....

If you use google scholar you'll find a fair few papers, you might not be able to read the whole paper but often the abstract will have an overview of the results/conclusions. I'm pretty sure that Lindsay's Handbook of Applied Dog behaviour and training has stuff in it I'm sure I've referenced it for essays on this type of topic, but I couldnt' tell you which volume - it normally comes up in a google books when you search for stuff, and there are some free electronic versions on the net somewhere but I dont' have the link. I don't really know what it is about Khanu and his diet. He does get occasional supermarket treats that will have carbs in, and I use kibble in food toys and for training with them all (not exclusively and I try to use less with Khanu but he does still get it occasionally). My opinion on him being better on raw is only after a couple of experiments. Once when we moved and I had to run down the freezer etc. so they went on a CSJ kibble - he got very noticeably worse within a few days of being on it, he was pretty close to the worst he has ever been, reacting to dogs over 100m away, reactive in the house with Willow, however we were also packing up the house etc at the same time so he could have been more generally stressed, we also got Syd just before we moved (only a few weeks before) so that won't have helped either. The second time was when I thought I'd try out Orijen, I just put Khanu on it everyone else got fed raw same as always. Khanu was a pain around meal times - trying to get to the others food, but that could of course have just been because they had better food as far as he was concerned, although khanu isn't particularly food motivated. His threshold distance seemed to increase, he would react when I really wasn't expecting him to, and as the month went on he got worse, however he also gets worse the more he reacts so because I was "off" in judging his safe distance he was probably put in more situations that he was uncomfortable with than he normally would be to begin with so that could have been a factor. I don't really know for definite that he is worse, it's just a feeling based on these couple of experiences. We went raw because Khanu wouldn't really eat his kibble when a puppy and I just felt it was a better way of feeding and suited us at the time. The two experiement just sort of happened, one because we were moving and moving a freezer full of food wasn't going to happen, and the other becasue orijen was new to the uk and was grain free and I wondered if that was the problem so thought I'd try it. That is what made me think it was possibly a carb thing, as although orijen doesn't have grain it does have the veg content and thus carbs. I wonder with him whether it's the omega3. Cereals are low in it, not sure about veg. There's stuff about animals fed omega3&6 supplements having lower levels of aggression. With the raw diet he should be getting a fair amount of omega3&6 and I normally supplement their mince meals with salmon oil as well (I've just run out). So with him it could well be that. There's so many mechanisms that affect/control aggression, I wrote an essay on it not long ago. Many mechanisms intermingle, most end up having something to do with serotoninergic pathways eventually. High levels of brain serotonin are associated with high plasma levels of omega3..... I think you're right about people not just feeding the kibble so the real diet percentages are skewed. Plus there's the leftovers the dog gets, his own supplementation of his diet with rotting carcasses etc. Whilst changing the diet can be effective in helping behaviour, personally for most dogs I think it's more to do with feeding a better quality food with fewer additives (so not bakers) rather than the exact percentage of protein. For aggressive dogs looking at trying to increase brain serotonin may be helpful. I've never found anything that suggests that serotonin/protein levels etc effect hyperactive behaviour - it's all about depressive/aggressive behaviour.

higher tryptophan *uptake* will lead to higher serotonin levels and happier dogs (assuming they were deficient in the first place). The tricky thing is that tryptophan is in competition with the other fatty acids in protein so just having more of it available doesn't necessarily mean you'll get higher levels of serotonin, and even with meat based proteins different types have different amounts of the different fatty acids. However if you fed something with high tryptophan levels along with high level of carbohydrate, the high carbs will cause insulin to rise, which prevents the other fatty acids from being taken up leaving the way clear for tryptophan and so more serotonin is made ( the same effect you get a xmas meal, lots of turkey with lots of tryptophan in along with all the carbohydrate also eaten at the same time means you make more serotonin and feel all happy and snoozy afterwards). Just because a food has no maize in it say it doesn't mean that you'll automatically get the increase in serotonin levels as it depends on the carbohydrate and the whole fatty acid uptake competition. Having said that I think you might be onto a loser with foods with maize as a main ingredient as I figure you must decrease the available tryptophan as maize is so low in it, unless of course it has a high carbohydrate content in which case it *might* be ok (although then you have to wonder if they'll be getting enough of the other fatty acids as well). Just because a food has high protein it wouldn't' necessarily follow that it has too low carbs for the sopping up effect, although percentage wise it must have a lower carb content. But then I think we are often talking about changing from say 20% protein to 18%, is that really significant? Much of the research done is with more significant differences than this I think (I'll admit to not having figured out the percentages to know for certain as they dont' normally give % figures just weights for protein , but one considered high protein as 30% and low as 18% - in that study they had high and low protein diets supplemented and not with tryptophan, aggression was highest in the high protein unsupplemented group, lowest in the low protein supplemented group). Some of the supplements you give dogs for stressy behaviour are based around increasing serotonin levels (normally through 5HTP, which is one stage before 5HT ie serotonin (if my biological chemistry is right!)) I believe that carbs makes my dog aggressive GSD way way worse, that's part of the reason I feed raw - he is so much better on it, when in theory he should be worse as I don't feed carbs in any volume at all. He was even noticeably worse on Orijen although not as bad as when on other commercial food, so I suspect very much that there are numerous factors at work. I do know of some behaviourists who have had success with the Val strong diet - protein meal followed by carb meal later, but I just don't think it's a very easy way to feed a dog as you need to feed 2 meals within a couple of hours of each other which can be hard for lots of reasons especially for those that work away from the house. There are also studies about the serotonin uptake sites - it seems some increase aggression, some decrease when serotonin binds with them, in aggressive dogs the increasing type are found in greater number, so the whole thing may just be a genetic predisposition...... I think it is far far more complicated than just, low protein = all your troubles are fixed, and while fascinating it's confusing and still not very well understood as far as how the sites work together etc. It is agreed that mammals and other animals with higher levels of serotonin in the brain show less aggression, it's just how that level is controlled and sustained

I'm not entirely convinced by arguments for protein levels in foods affecting hyperactivity. There is a case for it affecting aggression and even nervous/fear behaviours - mainly it seems through tryptophan the precursor to serotonin. However many of the cheaper foods use corn (maize) to up the protein levels, and this is deficient in tryptophan. Tryptophan also competes with other amino acids in proteins for uptake and conversion so ironically to increase tryptophan you need a low protein high carbohydrate diet as the carbohydrate causes a release of insulin which sort of clears the other amino acids away and leaves tryptophan available for uptake, so decreases competition. Or to use the Val strong diet where you feed a protein meal followed by a carbohydrate meal a few hours later, so getting the same effect. So there is the case that a low protein diet assuming it is a protein source with decent levels of tryptophan available (so animal based rather than maize) with higher carbohydrate would help aggression. However there are no studies that I've found that say that increasing tryptophan helps hyperactivity. For that I think it's more likely that people just start paying more attention to the ingredients in the food and end up using a food with fewer additives. On another note very few dogs have true hyperactivity, more normally it may be over activity due to boredom or other factors, or even more common peoples expectations not meeting that of a dog's real behaviour. People often change food at the same time as doing other things like feeding from an activity toy etc. so it's not just the food causing the change.

I use the task list in microsoft outlook as I mainly use my works laptop and it's mainly work related stuff in my to do lists. I like it as I can add things by just flagging an email message and I can also put priorities against them so as my list grows (it never seems to get shorter very often) I know exactly which ones need dealing with first. I've also found it helps blocking things in on the calendar on outlook too, so if I know I need x amount of time to do something each day (for me it's work related admin stuff that has to be done each day) I've blocked in 1/2 and hour every week day after lunch when I do that. It reminds me just before so i can't go a week and completely forget to do it at all, and if I'm too busy with something else that day it doesn't matter so much as I keep on top it much better by having an appointment each day. I've started doing the same with non-work stuff like the dogs training classes, reminders to organise treats for said classes, blocking in time for runs/bike rides etc. I've found that as I've got busier and busier I need to timetable stuff in and try and stick to it, so if it's now time to do college work I stop what I was doing and do that for whatever time I've set and so on. Just a teeny tiny bit anal but it has meant that I feel like I have more time as I'm not thinking about what I need to do all the time and wondering how I'll fit it in. Don't know if there is anything similar you can run on a mac as I've never ever used one (but thinking of getting one as my personal laptop has pretty much died now). I think this system only works for me though as I spend a huge amount of time in front of my laptop during the working week and I also leave my works blackberry on which is synchronised so I get the reminders still when I'm not at the laptop - I forward calls to a different number though when I'm not actually on work time as I learnt that lesson at 2am one morning.....

OH came swimming with us today so I had a free hand to take some pictures, although they aren't that great Talyn and the pig Talyn and the turkey Breckin and the pig Swimming back Tal looking quite sweet When actually he is a hooligan doing this most of the time They do love it though, although the serenading on the way there is becoming deafening

I'm annoyed (again) my hotmail account got hacked the other day so I had to change the password amongst other things. Because I've changed the password my balckberry isnt' getting the emails for this account. Can I manage to update the password on my balckberry? Can I f***. keeps getting errors, not saving updates, I can't even delete the account and create a new one. Vodafone are just s***, I can't even access it online to change it. When my contract is up I'm an so not staying with them they have been nothing but trouble from day 1 In other news Talyn has learnt to lay down not yet reliably on cue but I love watching him throw himself down in order to get a click and treat

I've posted but without actually saying anything about their behaviourist - I've explained what I do with Khanu. We'll see how it goes down.

But they aren't actually asking for help. It's a particular rescue's forum and the coordinators etc haven't said anything about the methods the poster has so far outlined. I really don't want to get anyone's back up. I'm pretty much chickening out but feel I need to find a more circuitous route somehow.

urgh, have been reading some posts on another forum about how someone is being advised to treat dog aggression. From the methods they are being advised I'd even have a guess at the franchise their behaviourist belongs to. I really really want to say something but really don't feel I can..... Really don't think the methods will be helping the dog at all, and the poster has said a few times that the aggression is not getting better - has hinted it's getting worse. must sit on hands....

Just because your shoulder injury is feeling much better doesn't mean you can just layoff the meds for a few days and then drive in over an hour to work and then work, and still have to face the drive home with a painful shoulder...... colleague is plying me with ibuprofen since I didn't bring my naproxen with me but it isn't helping much. very stupid I am.... Hoping a few days back on the pills and driving as little as possible will help. Walking the dogs has been fine, but driving really makes it ache.

Woooohoooo!!! Just got results back for my last essay for college - 78% baby! I can't believe it, I'm so happy......

I may have finally finished tweaking my survey to gather data for my dissertation. I have some friends checking it out now to make sure it makes sense and isn't a bastard to fill in. It doesn't quite do what I wanted it to do design wise, but I'm not paying out for fancy things, it'll just have to do, it just won't look as nice as I wanted it to. Really need to find the motivation for the final year and get cracking with research for the dissertation. I've done bits and pieces but really need to get my head down before college starts back. Also need to pull my finger out on the tri training and agility training particularly Breckin - I'd like to do some competitions over winter to get ready for the summer next year. Really must just get on with things and stop procrastinating. I may have to ban myself from the internet.

My sister lives in the flats by the meads I'm assuming I'm not needed for baby sitting duties today as I haven't had a call.....I was thinking of going today and tomorrow but the thought of doing not a lot today is quite appealing RMF: I had an implant put in on thursday. It appears I'm allergic to steri-strips - I have two lines of blisters formed beneath them so I've removed them. I'm now wondering whether I should put a plaster over the hole or whether it would be ok uncovered now..... On another note my shoulder seems to be ok now I can only assume I trapped something and that the anti-inflammatories did their job and allowed whatever was trapped to work free as I used the shoulder. I can feel/hear a bit of clicking and grinding when I move it but hopefully it will all be fine. I'm going without the pills this morning to see how it goes

Is that the chertsey show? My sister is jumping a horse there this morning (not her own) and I was considering making a trip up tomorrow once OH is off of nights.

It is great there I loved it. We went a number of years ago now and every time I drive past I think I must go again soon. It's only about 90mins from us I may convince OH to go soon when we both have a day off together. I don't think they had a vulture flying demo when we went - that would be great to see. They just had a talk by the vulture enclosure, but I learnt a lot - who knew vultures were so interesting? or pretty vital ether!

It's diclofenac that has been killing vultures - it's used extensively in cattle in India. It's very much like ibuprofen which I *think* may also kill vultures and that is obviously despensed to peoples. The problem in India is that the dead cattle are left out in the open the vultures eat and then die if the cow has been treated with diclofenac. I learnt this at the hawk conservancy in andover, hampshire where they are part of a research whotsit to try to prevent the extinction of these vultures (they are at real risk).

Naproxin is a miracle drug, although I am intrigued as to how Metacam tastes now.

So I could have stolen Syd's medication!

I recommend naproxen to anyone with a hurty shoulder Shoulder feels waaaay better already, can move it without passing out and everything Tomorrow I plan on being less self absorbed, however since it isn't quite tomorrow yet I would like to say I'm really please with the way Talyn is doing. Although nervous in the vets this morning he didn't freak out or pee and let Bill really look him over properly. And tonight in class he was lovely and focused, had amazingly fast sits, fab recall, and is starting to understand that the left side of me is a pretty good place to be when we walk. He even managed to lay down for a couple of seconds on his mat between exercises which is good, but even when he wasn't settled, he wasn't manic - he just sat staring at me, boring a hole into my forehead